When I left Jerusalem for some remote place in another country, some people in both Jerusalem and this new place told me sympathetically that my new life might be difficult because of a different sociocultural environment. But fortunately or unfortunately, I see no essential difference in that in any society the majority of people seem to be trapped in not only its collective ego but also their individual ego.
Being trapped in the collective ego of the society you live in means, first and foremost, that you are programmed to think, speak and act in accordance to what you have been indoctrinated to through education, sociocultural norms and peer pressure. Being trapped in the individual ego means, among others, that you incessantly talk to yourself by unconsciously commenting on and labeling everyone and everyone, including yourself, and worse still, you are unware of this.
It's true that there is something nice in sharing the same sociocultural norms with those you meet and interact with, but I feel more and more keenly that their state of consciousness, or whether they are liberated from both the collective ego and the individual ego, is far more important to me. I even feel that I can't build any meaningful relationship with anyone who is still stuck in either or both of these two traps. Their common denominator is the illusion of separation - us vs. them (the collective ego) and me vs. them (the individual ego).